Pages

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Pierre Huyghe at Los Angeles County Museum of Art

If even for a moment you let yourself become cynical or critical at all of Huyghe’s practice it dries and crumbles. Huyghe’s work is premised on “magic,” the tiny miracles of a child’s account of things*, like children’s stories a magical world in which people with absurdity endeavor expeditions, parties called at whim, puppets, and videos a jumble, with fog and mirrors still magical as home science fairs, and bees on heads, and snow in Los Angeles, and coloring the dog's leg pink, the work as though made by an unjaded art students run gleefully aloof (moreover than Höller's terrors) and given the patina of serious greys at times pompous and overblown to an extreme, (A Journey That Wasn’t punishingly excessive) but wildly affective if you can enjoy the magic of Disneyland Paris, but doesn't stand up well to under the light of adult’s critical cynicism, so make your choice before forking over the $25 at wherever this heads next.

*A surrealism oddly in proximity to Bader’s in which objects become de-specific in their categorical order. Edges fuzzed - dogs in galleries, parties called at “whim” - that magnifies that strangeness of "objects" de-ordered by economic rationality, the manic fallout of Judd’s very specific box.